Actress and singer
Born: October 12, 1942;
Died: May 3, 2017
DALIAH Lavi, who has died aged 74, was an actress and singer who got her initial break when the Hollywood star Kirk Douglas visited her village in Israel to make a film and she invited him to her 10th birthday party. She impressed him with her looks, confidence and determination to become a prima ballerina.
Douglas discussed the possibility of adopting her and taking her back to the United States, where she might have more opportunities, but her parents thought her too young. A couple of years later though, Douglas was instrumental in arranging for her to go to live with another actor Alf Kjellin in Stockholm and to study dance there.
She had only a brief career as a dancer in Sweden, but went on to enjoy considerable success in films in the 1960s, making her Hollywood debut in the drama Two Years in Another Town (1962), with Kirk Douglas.
Following a lengthy worldwide search, she landed the lead female role opposite Peter O’Toole in a big-budget 1964 adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s novel Lord Jim. Hailed as one of the most beautiful women in the world, with a hint of mystery about her, the dark-haired, dark-eyed Lavi seemed perfect casting as the title character’s lover, albeit the character was Malay and she was Israeli.
There was a lot of hype about Lord Jim, which was selected for the Royal Film Performance, and it was widely expected to make her a major star. But it did disappointingly at the box office and Lavi’s career did not quite take off as it might have done.
Nevertheless she went on to star in Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians (1965), the original star-studded, very silly version of Casino Royale (1967), with David Niven, Woody Allen and Orson Welles, and the western Catlow (1971) with Yul Brynner and Leonard Nimoy.
Her film career then stalled in the early 1970s. Subsequently she settled down to family life in North Carolina, where her fourth husband named his company Daliah Plastics, but she enjoyed further success as a singer, recording in German, one of several languages in which she was fluent.
She was born Daliah Lewinbuk in 1942 in the British mandate of Palestine, a few years before the creation of the modern state of Israel. Her mother was a refugee from Nazi Germany, her father was of Gypsy descent and worked as a gardener.
She met Kirk Douglas when he was making a film called The Juggler in her village outside Haifa. After her sojourn in Sweden, she returned to Israel and worked as a model, which led to film work. Still only 17 she married for the first time, to a Frenchman, and moved to Paris. Many of her early films were in France.
Her first marriage lasted only two years and she moved on to Rome, where she was reunited with Kirk Douglas on Two Weeks in Another Town, for which she got a Golden Globe nomination as best newcomer, and then on to London, her home at the time of Lord Jim. “I like to refer to myself as a woman of the world,” she told one interviewer.
She was 22 when Lord Jim came out but she had already made 15 films, using the name Daliah Lavi (which means lioness in Hebrew). Notable early films include Mario Bava’s cult movie The Whip and the Body (1963) – she provided the body, Christopher Lee the whip – and the German western Old Shatterhand (1964).
Shortly before Lord Jim came out, she said: “I like acting and it pays well, and they say one day I will become a big star, but I don’t really care about an acting career. I’d rather be a dancer.”
It was perhaps just as well that she did not care too much about her acting career, because she did not quite make that leap to superstardom. After Lord Jim she drifted towards comedy. She lent her exotic beauty and mystique to several secret agent spoofs, including the Matt Helm adventure The Silencers (1966), with Dean Martin, and The Spy with a Cold Nose (1966) – he is a dog – as well as to the James Bond film Casino Royale.
In the first half of the 1970s she had a string of hit singles in Germany, including Oh, wann kommst du? (Oh, When Are You Coming?) and Willst du mit mir geh'n (Do You Want to Go With Me?).
Away from the international spotlight, she lived quietly in Asheville, North Carolina, for the last 25 years, although she continued recording into her sixties.
She is survived by her fourth husband and by four children.
BRIAN PENDREIGH
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